Lesotho is a small, land-locked country within South Africa, and it's to this small place that author Will McGrath and his wife Ellen traveled so she could conduct research on AIDS and orphans, two topics very sadly intertwined in this country. But that wasn't all they found there, as McGrath recounts in his memoir of his first year there.

If your gut reaction is, oh no, another book about a white guy who goes to an African country and either acts as savior or uses the local people to learn more about himself or save himself, I've got great news for you: Neither of those scenarios is this book. He makes that clear early on in the book:

"I can say one thing with certainty: I did not come to Lesotho to find myself. There is nothing more tedious than white people venturing into foreign territory in search of self-knowledge, in search of authenticity--which must be among the language's emptiest words. There is something deeply unsettling about people who collect the essential stuff of someone else's existence for exotic furniture in their own small-scale dramas. I did not come to Lesotho for set dressing; I came to learn about the different ways that people live."

That's exactly what he does. His wife's career is what brings them to Lesotho, and he uses his teaching credentials to lead a classroom in the local school. He keeps his eyes wide open and his mind as well. He's willing to explore, to talk, to get to know people at all stations of life. Granted, it's his book, so if he personally engaged in some "let me show you a better way", he left it out. But I'm trusting from this account that he didn't do that. He (and his wife) seemed to honestly want to see how people lived in Lesotho, and he shares what he's learned, with little judgment and with plenty of context. If there's an anecdote that seems to gently push fun at something someone there said or did, you can bet there will be one where McGrath mocks himself.

There's plenty of fun here, but plenty of sadness too. A huge percentage (25%) of the adult population has AIDS, and 28% of the children have lost one or both parents to it. That's a profound epidemic that cannot help but have sad moments, and McGrath doesn't shy away from them.

But neither does he shy away from the wicked and sometimes bawdy senses of humor many of the Lesotho people he meets have, or their generous socializing; he's game to try anything they put in front of him, even the mysterious joala, a home-brewed maize beer that varies greatly from home to home.

Which is likely why, even though the country battles disease and poverty, McGrath and his wife--along with kids--opted to return after their first stint was up. They made friends. They became part of the local society. They respected the local society and worked when possible to operate within its rules and customs (well, other than that pesky patriarchal part that sometimes raised its head).

Besides being interested in these kinds of stories in general, I had another reason to be curious about this book. Back in the 1980s, when I graduated from college, one of my best friends from college joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Lesotho. She was an engineer tasked with helping the local villages develop better access to water. There was culture shock for her, of course, but she, like McGrath, was sincerely interested in the culture and the people and wanted to see life as they saw it. Which she would have done, but sadly, she was murdered a few months into her tour. The murderers were robbing her lodging to sell her belongings. The village, in turn, created a needlework tapestry illustrating the work Lesa (my friend) had done in helping them get water and sent to Lesa's family back in the US. I have often wondered about the country, which she was excited about, and which responded to the unthinkable in such a beautiful way.

I think she would have enjoyed McGrath's book, and more, the spirit in which he embarked on his exploration of Lesotho. If you'd like to learn more about my friend (and see photos of Lesotho), click here.

Oof. This is a short, thought-provoking, disturbing little novel out of Norway. Alma is a divorced textile artist with grown children who has made a comfortable, if not wealthy, life for herself. She lives in a seaside cottage in Norway that she can afford because she rents out an attached apartment. She considers herself a feminist, a social liberal, but in reality, she's not much connected to the world around her; her artistic process when creating her artworks is comprehensive, time-consuming, and involves pretty much shutting the rest of the world out.

When a young Polish family applies to move into the apartment, she accepts them without much concern and doesn't even push them to make the supposedly required deposit. They seem like ideal tenants; the dad even does some renovation work in the apartment, which Alma accepts as in lieu of the deposit.

All seems especially well when Alma receives a prestigious--and profitable--commission from a national organization. But all is not well with the Polish tenants, and gradually Alma is both drawn into and repelled by learning more about them. The little she learns sets off a set of chain reactions in her emotionally, in which she begins to make assumptions. Really big assumptions.

This book is so unsettling because it's taking place in the head of a person who is complacent about her political beliefs, but has never really had them challenged. And it's perhaps a different view than journalists have taken in the past few years. Instead of looking at one large disenfranchised group of people who hate another group of people, here we're looking at one person who believes she doesn't hate, but when confronted with one small example of another group, begins to have misgivings and starts to wonder about that group as a whole. Which I suspect happens more than we know, unfortunately.

The book is told through long blocks of text, with run-on sentences that can slow the reading, but I don't mean that in a bad way. It fits the main character and really brings us into her head, even though it's in third person. Alma is in a state of not being terribly self-aware, yet slowly--painfully--becoming self-aware, in bits and spurts. During her research for the large commission, she uncovers a story from decades ago about a woman who was unfairly locked up in a psychiatric hospital, largely because she was an ungrateful wife who ran away from her dour husband, and it draws her to an unpleasant conclusion about herself:

"Having recently read about the narrowness of women's choices a century or two ago, it had occurred to [Alma] that had she lived back then, there was a strong possibility that she too would have been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, since she too struggled with norms and following the dictates of the day. Then she checked herself and blushed at the courage she had just attributed to herself. The chance were much greater, indeed close to one hundred percent, that she would have submitted to poor conditions rather than run away from anything. She would have accepted her restricted sphere and limited opportunities, or worse, believed them to be the most natural thing in the world. Hindsight and retrospective bravery were so easy."

Alma is highly flawed, unreliable, at times unlikable, but it's hard not to see aspects of her in many people, including myself. She's someone whose basic life assumptions haven't been tested much. That pertains to a lot of people today. And that's what makes this a worthwhile read and, I suspect (and will eventually find out), a worthwhile re-read.

Earlier this past fall, I read my first William Kent Krueger novel, Desolation Mountain, which I liked quite a lot. Doing some reading about him, I found that he's got a very popular series featuring Cork O'Connor, but his novel Ordinary Grace, which won an Edgar Award, is a stand-alone book which has gotten a lot of acclaim. I'm not always up for committing to a series, so I decided to read the stand-alone next.

Boy howdy, I loved it. It's not perfect, but the imperfections were things I could let go. Perhaps the biggest imperfection was Krueger's attempt to include a Native American character that basically served only to break up stereotypes. That's a worthy goal, certainly, but when I sit back and look at the story as a whole, removing that subplot changes nothing in the book. I appreciate Krueger wanting to do that, but I wish he'd either done more with it, or done away with it.

The book is told by a man named Frank who looks back at his youth from 40 years in the future. He spent some years in a fictional Minnesota town bearing more than a small resemblance to New Ulm, where his father was assigned as a Methodist pastor. Specifically, Frank is looking back to the summer of 1961, which was a summer that would forever affect his family's lives going forward, starting with the unexpected death of a child on railroad tracks, and going forward to a teenage girl disappearing under mysterious circumstances.

I figured out about halfway through what the mystery was and who was guilty, and normally, that would annoy me. But I was so invested in Frank, who's an endearing and exasperating young man, and his younger brother, Jake. Their parents struggle with some problems of their own; when they got married, Frank's father was on track to become a hotshot lawyer, but ended up in WWII. When he returned, he had changed dramatically and decided to become a minister. This was not what Frank's mother thought she'd signed up for, and her resentment is still simmering years later.

Bottom line: The characters here are more important than the mystery, which is my favorite kind of mystery. Krueger nails small-town life in 1960s Minnesota, and he nails the difficulties of growing up at any time, or trying to grapple with tragedy and religion in all its forms. It's a lovely book, and I'm so glad I read it.

So, fun story. I was in need of some escapist entertainment and stumbled on a trailer for Ekaterina, a TV series about the rise of Catherine the Great. I knew pretty much zero about Catherine the Great, but the trailer looked like a melodramatic costume drama that would entertain me while not demanding much of me.

I was right on both counts. It was hugely entertaining, at least the first season, and didn't demand much of me. However, as I watched it, I began to wonder how much was actually true. Then I remembered that I had this book on the shelves. It was an impulse grab--a literal grab; I was helping a friend clean out her mother's apartment, and the friend told me to take any books that looked interesting. Well, of course I took books, who wouldn't? And this was one of them.

The good news is that Catherine's life and reign as Empress is fascinating. The bad news is that it spoiled the TV series for me. The actor playing Catherine is just not that good. In the first season, she's completely upstaged by the actors who play her mother-in-law Empress Elizabeth, and demented husband, Peter III. Those two completely stole the show. But--slight spoiler--they're both dead by the end of season one. And the TV Catherine herself just wasn't enough to keep me interested in season two.

Which is really a shame, because the real Catherine is so, so interesting. She was a brilliant politician and tactician. She was also incredibly patient, which had no small role in her becoming empress, something certainly not guaranteed to a minor German princess brought into Russia to marry Peter and bear heirs. There were parts of the series that were fictionalized, and I'd understand that, if it weren't for the fact the real-life stories were so much more interesting than the made-up parts.

She wasn't perfect. She started her reign trying to implement the enlightened views of the likes of Voltaire and even toyed with ending serfdom. But by the end of her time, the French Revolution scared her into beginning to restrict things she'd always allowed, like freedom of the press. Her relationship with her son Paul, of uncertain parentage on the father's side (but believed by Russians to be Peter III's son and therefore in line to rule), was strained and difficult, and a good bit of that was her fault.

She was also quite the libertarian when it came to love, having always a young man in her bed. Catherine grew older, but the men stayed young, something that caused gossip in the court. But Catherine knew what she wanted and needed, and she simply expected to have both wants and needs met. It helps to be empress of a wealthy, huge country. But it also helps that, as a sharp politician, she was known for actually listening to people and trying to help them where she could. Eventually she introduced schools, hospitals, and other civic improvements all across the country, and even sponsored the education of Russian artists and architects in Europe as well.

The biography is mostly well done. It's largely chronological, although some chapters take on a theme and cover several years of that theme, which is fine. The one thing that I questioned is the heavily descriptive section about the French Revolution. I got the sense that the author is fascinated with it (who wouldn't be? It's interesting) and would like to write a book about it. But this isn't the right book for it. A large part of that text has nothing to do with Catherine, and it's not until the next chapter that he begins to give us her reactions and growing concerns about it. It would have been much better to merge those two chapters and show us a little less of what actually happened and a little more of Catherine's response to it. Catherine was a voluminous correspondent and wrote her own memoir, which are quoted throughout, and surely there was plenty that could have been used to bolster her responses to the French Revolution.

But in the end, a really good read, not at all trashy, but scholarly while still being interesting and thoughtful. See? I went for trash and ended up--heh--enlightened. Not a bad way to go. Now if the makers of The Crown would only take on this book and give it a proper dramatization. But, if you're in the mood for Russian melodrama? The first season of Ekaterina (on Amazon) has some seriously good scenery-chewing in the roles of Peter III and his mother, Elizabeth.

Recently I read and loved Kate DiCamillo's Raymie Nightingale, and especially loved the character of Louisiana Elefante. Well, DiCamillo obligingly wrote a book just about her that takes place after Raymie Nightingale.

In Louisiana's Way Home, Louisiana's granny wakes her up in the middle of the night (in 1977) and says the day of reckoning has arrived, and they must leave their home in Florida immediately. This is not particularly unusual behavior for her granny, and off they go. But it becomes clear that Granny does not plan to return, and that's a big change.

Louisiana is a little girl with a lot of hunger, physical and emotional, and Granny is pushing her luck just a bit too hard this time. When they land in the town of Richford, GA by accident after Granny desperately needs some dental care, it looks like they'll have to stay put a while. That's a hardship to Louisiana, who is humiliated by the highly suspicious (and not entirely incorrectly so) owner of the motel they stay at. But soon she meets a young boy who has a crow for a friend--a friend who can get her more food to eat.

And things then go even further downhill. Louisiana, who is telling the story, makes it clear from the get-go that this story has a good amount of sadness in it. I've talked before about DiCamillo's willingness to write about hard stuff for kids, and she hasn't backed off on that here. There are times when I choked up--something that rarely happens when I read.

There was an interesting review of this book on Goodreads that talks about how often DiCamillo's children are living without a safety net, which is something adults find difficult to read about. But the reviewer (sorry, just went back to look for it and couldn't find it) notes that in DiCamillo's work, these children are often living in a real-world version of a fairy tale. What child in a fairy tale has a safety net?

It's a slight spoiler to say that the book doesn't end badly. But Louisiana goes through some hard things and learns some hard truths before she gets there.

I loved it. It made me weepy and wishing Louisiana was sitting at my kitchen table so I could make her a big pan of tuna noodle hot dish followed by chocolate cake with ice cream. DiCamillo is a blessing.

Oh, man, this is a sneaky little book. Keiko is someone who has always had trouble fitting in, from a very young age. She's extremely literal and practical; when a playground fight breaks out at her school and someone calls for someone to stop it, she calmly picks up a shovel and bashes the head of one of the fighters. Mission accomplished, fight over. And yet the school and her parents don't seem to think that was a good idea on her part. Imagine that.

At age 18, Keiko is wandering aimlessly, trying to figure out how to fit in so as not to make others uncomfortable. Her sister is a great help, teaching her phrases and responses that will seem acceptable to most people. But when Keiko discovers a new convenience store about to open and is hired for a job there, it seems she has found her place. The store offers routine, set expectations, even a series of phrases to be used with customers every day. Keiko has found a place she belongs, a place she can excel.

And for the next 18 years, she does excel. But then society starts noticing that there's a 36-year-old woman who not only isn't married with children, but isn't dating anyone, and apparently never has. Well, that's not a good situation, right? So poor Keiko finds herself under scrutiny, with people disparaging her job and her singleton status.

But Keiko comes up with a plan.

And that's all I'll say about that.

This is a cheeky book, subverting expectations, and making some very pointed commentary on societal expectations. I've seen people comment that they think Keiko is on the spectrum. I'm not in a position to judge, and I'm hesitant to make that statement, especially given some of Keiko's extreme solutions to life's problems. I will say that she is a singular person who's aware that she's different and has developed methods of trying to--maybe not fit in, even if that's how she describes it, but escape notice while keeping her routines and her life in the order she prefers. And who are we to say her way is wrong?

In her own way, Keiko is self-aware, and she's also got more understanding of other people than she realizes:

"They were harsh words, but he uttered them so quietly I somehow didn't get the feeling he was all that angry. From where I stood, there were two types of prejudiced people--those who had a deep-rooted urge for prejudice and those who unthinkingly repeated a barrage of slurs they'd heard somewhere. [He] appeared to be the latter."

And: "The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of."

At the very least, I'll be more aware of my interactions with convenience store women--and men--in the future.

First off, a personal best: I read 137 books in 2018. That's a huge leap from any previous year. Looking back, I see 3 reasons for that. First, my father died in February after a long, slow decline (he was 95). So for the first 6 weeks of the year, I spent a lot of time at his nursing home while he was unconscious. That meant I read a lot. Second, this was the year I had a grant to research and write a novel, and as part of my process, I incorporated a lot of reading into my work day (you can read more about that here). Finally, not by choice but by happenstance, I read a large number of shorter books this year. I don't anticipate hitting a number like that again anytime soon, unless I continue reading very short books. But I have some doorstops calling my name going into 2019. And quality means more than quantity, right? Fortunately for me, it was overall a great year of reading.

I never realized that I might be interested in Princess Margaret until this book came onto my radar. My interest in the royal family has generally been limited to the Princess Diana era (and I was Team Diana all the way), or watching The Crown on Netflix. But I read about Ninety-Nine Glimpses, and it sounded kind of surreal and fantastic, and here we are.

I loved it.

Author Craig Brown turns biography upside down and inside out. The book is, at the title truthfully promotes, 99 glimpses of the younger sister of the current queen. The glimpses are mostly, but not entirely, chronological. The glimpses are mostly, but not entirely, true. One glimpse sent me running to Google to see if the princess had actually been married to Pablo Picasso. No, she was not. But apparently, Picasso was entirely smitten with her and did want to marry her. So Brown simply gives us a glimpse of what that might have looked like.

To be fair, Brown also is quick to note where he's making things up. What he's doing--100% successfully, in my opinion--is giving us a fractured portrait of a fractured woman. In the process, Brown doesn't sugarcoat the princess' temperament, which made her someone I don't think I would have wanted to meet in real life. She can be crazy unsympathetic. Brown also doesn't shy away from the concept that maybe being a "lesser" royal might have had an impact on that. He doesn't apologize for her, though, and he doesn't attempt to explain away her bad behavior. He just sets out a variety of potential factors and lets the reader decide. Or try to decide--it's a complex situation, and she was a complex woman.

Brown also takes sharp aim at official royal biographers, with excerpts that are guffaw-inducing:

"Of all the adjectives used to describe the Queen Mother, 'radiant' is surely the most frequent. During her lifetime it almost became part of her title, like Screamin' Jay Hawkins or Shakin' Stevens. Radiant this, radiant that: she might have popped out of the womb radiant, and continued radiating morning, noon and night. As time went on, it became hard to imagine her ever unradiant, but then again, she never had to put out the bins, or book a ticket online, or trudge around a supermarket with a twelve-pack of toilet paper. She seems to have achieved her perpetual radiance by ring-fencing herself from anything unpleasant or -- a favourite word, this -- 'unhelpful.' She was singular in her pursuit of happiness, banishing anything upsetting from her walled garden of delight. She rarely attended funerals or memorial services, even of old friends, and was a stranger to deathbeds."

He's also not particularly sympathetic to Captain Peter Townsend, he of the tortured royal romance with Princess Margaret. One has to wonder what both Townsend and Margaret would make of Prince Harry's recent marriage to divorced Meghan Markle.

One entire chapter is given to a relatively modest incident in Margaret's life, told over and over again different styles. Each segment is given a heading of that style: Journalistic, Comic, Statistical, Alliterative, Confrontational, Discreet, Haiku, Index, Optimistic. Pages and pages. Hilarious and wonderful.

This isn't a format that would work well for many biographies. But it was wonderful for Princess Margaret. There's more than a bit of cheekiness--I mean, look at that cover, with those magnificent sunglasses and the queen peering anxiously over her sister's shoulder. A biography like no other, and in the end, gives the reader a lot to chew on in terms of opinions of the prickly, difficult princess.

When I posted about the first book in Sarah Stonich's Northern Trilogy, Vacationland, I noted that it was flawed, but I liked enough of it to read the next book. So I did; Laurentian Divide is the second book. And like the first, I found it flawed, but likable. Mostly.

We're back to Hatchet Inlet, the fictional setting of Vacationland, and many of the same characters are here. The story is centered, somewhat, on widower Alpo and his fiance, Sissy, and Alpo's adult son Pete. But like the first book, there are many other characters, a few too many. The story told between these three is plenty to fill a book.

The story opens promisingly at the town diner where Hatchet Inlet's residents are getting worried: the eccentric Rauri Parr, who is the last resident allowed to live in the adjacent Reserve (think Minnesota's Boundary Waters), has not appeared in town since the ice went out on the lake. The residents worry: What happened? Is Rauri dead? He lives in a very remote place, difficult to get to, should someone check on him? (Side note: Rauri appears to be a tip of the hat to Dorothy Molter, the last resident of the Boundary Waters.)

Great opening, but then the book immediately goes into backstory, something that happens over and over--and over and over--again. It was so frequent that I found myself pulled out of the story, sitting back and thinking, Did I need to read this scene, did I need this knowledge, just now, just here? And the answer the majority of the time was: No. I did not need that info. Worse, the backstory had the effect of diminishing the tension in several key scenes. If all this backstory was so important, I think the book would have been better with a chronological structure.

It's a shame, because the parts of the story told in the present time were really good, really interesting, and I loved many of the characters. But between the backstory and the too-quickly and too-neatly-tied-up ending, I ended up disappointed.

Yes, I'll read the third book, because I want to see how this all plays out, and the parts that are good are really enjoyable. But I'll come at it with a bit of concern.

This is a handsome little volume, very well curated by Gyles Brandreth. In its short 166 pages, he covers a wide variety of historical ages and tones, from wry to satiric to sweet. We've got Dickens, of course, because you pretty much can't have a Christmas anthology without him. But we also have Queen Victoria and Quentin Crisp, Ali Smith and Mrs. Beeton, Saint Bonaventure, and Christmas memories from American slaves. You can't blame the editor for not trying to get a variety of viewpoints.

Regardless, it's a fun (mostly) read, each individual piece fairly short, and none like the one before it. It's a book I thoroughly enjoyed reading, and I also enjoy the idea of adding it to my Christmas shelf and returning to it in years to come.